‘The phantom of the Opera’: the lost voice of opera in silent film

Abstract

Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In theNew York Timesof 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that.I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.